Note: This will involve ChasexJack

Disclaimer: I do not own Xiaolin Showdown

Chapter 1

In fifteen hundred years, he had done a lot. As well as honing his martial art skills until he was an unrivaled tai chi master and periodically adding to his collection of fallen warriors, Chase Young had done many simpler things in his long, long life, and had private talents that he indulged in occasionally for no reason other than to quench boredom. After all, few events of great importance had occurred between the Xiaolin and the Heylin in the last thousand years.

Chase had traveled more than he cared to admit; he had stepped onto – or rather, transported onto – every continent in the modern world; he had walked the highlands of Scotland, the sandy beaches of the Caribbean and the icy glaciers of Iceland. He'd witnessed geographical wonders, such as the clearest aurora borealis and the massive eruption of an active volcano, and walked on all terrains.

He had simpler hobbies, of sorts; he did them to relieve himself of boredom rather than for actual pleasure, but nevertheless they gave him a sense of being every bit more talented than he had been beforehand – such acts feed his ever-active ego. Of course, such things were done privately and were not witnessed by anyone, not even his jungle beasts, for the most part. Save for a few of them, nobody in the world knew that Chase Young could play the piano rather well; that he could swim farther and faster than anyone alive; that he could tell the time of day just by looking at the stars.

Yes, Chase Young had done so much in his lifetime that, if you did not know he was immortal, you would never have believed that he could do so much so well. Yet there were things he had never done in his life.

Some of them had presented him with opportunities throughout his lifetime but had never captured his interest. For example, he had never indulged in dancing or singing or in novel writing; so many people did in a lifetime of fifty years, and yet in fifteen hundred years Chase Young had never been interested enough to do these things. He had never indulged in simpering activities such as sewing or bird watching, this time because the very thought made his skin crawl with distaste; he was a Heylin warlord and had no time whatsoever for such nonsense.

Indeed, there were things he had not done. The most notable of which was this: Chase Young had never fallen in love. Never. Not once.

Oh, he'd had lovers aplenty – lovers of both sex and of varying intelligence and with polar opposite personalities. When living for fifteen hundred years, one does tend to experiment a little, and Chase had been pleased to find that, in reality, sex was sex; he found that, although his earliest lovers had all been female, sex with another male was quite different but no less pleasurable.

Chase had had many opportunities to fall in love and yet he never had. For the most part, he had always understood why: they were not good enough to be worthy of his love. He was Chase Young, and realistically, nobody was good enough; that was why he had not loved those men and women.

And even with this understanding, Chase had often been confused and enraged by himself. There had been, over time, the odd one or two who were special; those two were the only previous lovers that he genuinely remembered, the rest having faded into the recesses of his memory along with other people and pieces of information that he deemed unimportant.

One had been a slender young man with dark hair, pale skin and almond-shaped green eyes, whose lust for evil had been his biggest attraction. Chase remembered him but did not remember his name and it was possibly for the best. He had understood Chase's desire for evil and had even been entertained by the knowledge that Chase imprisoned fallen warriors as jungle beasts. Overall, he had connected with Chase, who had in turn helped him to become more evil, away from petty theft and pointless murders. However, eventually he had deemed himself more evil than Chase Young – which was egotistical and far from the truth – and challenged his lover to a fight. It had not been much of a fight, Chase recalled: it had taken him mere moments for him to close his hand around his rebellious lover's throat and choke him to death. He had, truthfully, been hurt by the betrayal; he'd liked this one. Liked, of course, not loved. He could have – arguably, should have – loved this man, but he had never done so, and to this day he did not know why he had never fallen, for he had not seen the betrayal coming. Those were his earlier years.

The second of these remembered lovers, one that had disappeared from his life approximately four hundred years ago, was a woman with auburn hair and eyes so dark they appeared black. She had been young, around twenty one, and the daughter of one of Chase's greatest tai chi rivals. She had also been on the Xiaolin side, and this had been Chase's biggest attraction to the strong-willed female monk: she was an enemy and so forbidden fruit. He had made it his personal mission to tempt her – for she was a formidable opponent to most fighters although not much competition to Chase himself – into the Heylin side. And over the course of several months, he had succeeded; she had followed him into evil as well as into his bed, and they had remained together for almost a full decade before she witnessed him slaughter some of her former comrades and, in a burst of guilt, took her own life. Afterwards, Chase was furious with himself for not seeing how weak her heart truly was compared to the strong image she deliberately projected, and for failing to realise that she was not as evil as she had the potential to be.

That woman's name had been Mara, and his relationship with her was the closest he had ever come to loving another person. He had almost loved her – had genuinely cared for her – but the time for him to actually fall in love did not come.

And so the point remains: Chase Young had never once loved another.

He had wants and needs and satisfactions, for both people and power. He had had so many lovers over the course of his fifteen hundred years that he was genuinely unknowing of how he had never actually fallen in love, and although he acknowledged that, as a true Heylin, he had no need of love, he would have still liked to know precisely what it felt like, if only for the knowledge. Chase was, of course, powerful and talented, but he was also thoroughly educated.

And the only way to understand love was to fall into it, and so this was his aim; after all, he had no doubt in his mind that he was powerful enough to escape from it once he had fallen. It was a test, another obstacle that he could defeat, albeit a personal one.

With this intention, he had taken a lover named _ a century ago and had done everything in his power to fall in love with her; he had tried avidly to fall for this woman, had made sure she was both inclined to evil and beautiful and appealing. There was no logical reason for him not to love her, and she even professed more than once that she loved him. Eventually, though, he realised his project was a failure and cast the sobbing woman aside, his whim to have her around done with.

He was also done with falling in love. He had come to the conclusion that, as a true Heylin, he could not fall in love, and with a smidgen of regret he realised that he could not and would never fall in love.

That is, until a certain young man came along when Chase Young was already more or less fifteen hundred years of age. He did seek this man out as a lover; at first he pushed him away, and not without reason. The boy was young and idolised him, and at first Chase was sure that, once the boy got to know who Chase really was, he would not want him anymore. It had shamed him a little, he admitted; the boy was exotic with his white skin and red eyes and was tempting to Chase because he professed already to be evil. Not to mention that, as a lesser note, Chase had never had an albino of either gender as a lover.

It took a few years for him to accept the boy into his home – hard years, during which he avoided showing the boy that, gradually, he was coming to find him less of an annoyance and more of a temptation. His treatment of the boy had always been harsh, partly because, when they had first met, Chase had loathed the boy who was so irritating and a constant thorn in his side because of his frequent visits to Chase's domain; it was also partly because Chase could never take the boy into his bed as a lover if the boy expected gentle treatments such as flowers and candlelit dinners, because these were not Chase Young's view of courtship.

And despite all attempts to push him away and all the tests of the boy's loyalty, he had marvelled that the boy was persistent enough to periodically visit his home and even bold enough to touch him, even when Chase viciously discouraged it.

When this boy came into his life, Chase noticed a change immediately. But it was not until he had been with the boy for over three years when he realised the extent of that change.

This boy had done for him what no other had ever done.

The boy's name was Jack Spicer.

Please R&R